Boxill urges local students to embrace Mandarin
Published:Wednesday | November 27, 2019 | 12:21 AMChristopher Thomas/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
The plan by Montego Bay Community College (MBCC) to roll out its Mandarin programme has received strong backing from Professor Ian Boxill, who argues that the teaching of the Chinese language will increase the skill sets and marketability of Jamaican workers.
Boxill, deputy principal of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, urged the country to tap opportunities with Chinese businesses and government officials as Beijing seeks to assert its economic and political muscle globally, especially in the Americas.
“The fact of the matter is that China will be one of the most important players in the world. Those of you who are young enough should try to learn some Mandarin, because you never know when you may need to call on it, and the days of monolingualism are basically over,” said Boxill, who was addressing the MBCC’s graduating class of 2019 at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James on Sunday.
“Your college is about to embark on a very grand enterprise, as you will start teaching Mandarin come next year, and this is a means of diversifying your skill set. Unless you learn a new language, there are very few places that you can actually rise to the top across the world, and by the time you leave here and go to another country, what you’ll find is that a lot of these people are multilinguistic,” he told the graduands.
The MBCC’s Mandarin programme will follow in the footsteps of the UWI’s Western Jamaica Campus, which launched a similar initiative in 2014 to capitalise on deepening China-Jamaica relations.
The programme was announced by MBCC principal Dr Maureen Nelson in April and has been endorsed by Chinese Ambassador Tian Qi.
China has deepened its footprint in Jamaica over the last decade, ploughing billions of dollars into divested state assets in the bauxite and sugar industries, as well as loans and grants in infrastructure projects and the construction of schools.
Meanwhile, Boxill noted that within the Caribbean region, English speakers are actually in the minority.
“ ... Haiti alone [whose official language is French] has a population of over 10 million, and Cuba [whose official language is Spanish] has 14 million people. If you were to add up all of the English-speaking countries, it would not add up to 10 million, and we’re not even talking about South America,” said Boxill.